HOW IT ALL STARTED Imagine it’s a couple of years ago, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. You’re tan from lying out next to your rock-lined pool, you’ve got on your new Juicy sweats (remember when everybody wore those?), and your mind’s on your crush, the boy who goes to that other prep school whose name we won’t mention and who folds jeans at Abercrombie in the mall. You’re eating your Cocoa Krispies just how you like ’em—doused in skim milk—and you see this girl’s face on the side of the milk carton. MISSING. She’s cute—probably cuter than you—and has a feisty look in her eyes. You think, Hmm, maybe she likes soggy Cocoa Krispies too. And you bet she’d think Abercrombie boy was a hottie as well. You wonder how someone so…well, so much like you went missing. You thought only girls who entered beauty pageants ended up on the sides of milk cartons. Well, think again. Aria Montgomery burrowed her face in her best friend Alison DiLaurentis’s lawn. “Delicious,” she murmured. “Are you smelling the grass?” Emily Fields called from behind her, pushing the door of her mom’s Volvo wagon closed with her long, freckly arm. “It smells good.” Aria brushed away her pink-striped hair and breathed in the warm early-evening air. “Like summer.” Emily waved ’bye to her mom and pulled up the blah jeans that